The niche and paratextual industries of games and play

Computers or Pirates??

When I realised the time had come to design my own game, without a team to help me, I will admit it, I was very nervous, doubting my own creativity. Ideas flowed so easily within my group game design project that it seemed too good to be true of having that luck on my own.

I soon realised it wasn’t as tricky as I thought. The tricky part is developing the mechanics of the game and creating rules. Initially, I had two main ideas for a game.

Ocean capture:

The main idea of this potential game was for players to catch treasure in an “ocean”, and race against each other to see who completes the task first. The backstory to this game is as follows: There was an accident in the ocean between multiple pirate ships, where all ships collide, causing the treasure to fall out. Each pirate player wants…